


although you know the snow will follow

by greenlily



Category: Magids Series - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Canon Compliant Nonsexual Consent Issues, Canon Compliant Original Characters, F/M, M/M, Magic, Mind Control, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 13:32:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1081579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenlily/pseuds/greenlily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deep roots are not reached by the frost.</p>
<p>Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.</p>
<p>Both of these things are true, but not always at the same time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	although you know the snow will follow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bookchan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookchan/gifts).



> There are explanatory notes for some of the references in this story. They can be found here: [here](http://greenlily.livejournal.com/599211.html).
> 
> This story contains discussion of non-sexual consent issues, related to canon events that involve children casting mind-control spells on each other and their parents. The events themselves aren't discussed graphically, but my recipient asked for a story that dealt with the repercussions of the events, so if this is something you'd prefer to avoid you might want to walk on by.

**from the ashes a fire shall be woken**

1.

I had been living with Mrs. Candace for two weeks when my grandfather came to see me. 

Since the changes in magic had whisked away whatever invisible creatures had lived with her and seen to the housework, she had begun teaching me to cook. It was not going well. I don't think she blamed me, exactly, but it can't be denied that I did a lot of washing-up those first two weeks.

Grandad found me sitting on the staircase outside the kitchen door with Dad's old copy of Baring-Gould's _Herbs And Flowers Of Western England_ , frantically scribbling notes. There was a big glass mug next to me. The liquid in it had been ginger tea when I sat down several hours ago, but now it was a pool of cold water with a sad soggy little heap of dried things in the bottom.

"Good book." Grandad nodded at the Baring-Gould's distinctive green cover. "He was like your young man, you know. Not a Magid, but learned to walk between here and Earth. Collected folk songs over there."

Well, if he wasn't going to pretend this was just a random visit, neither was I. "If you've come with a message from Earth, you can keep it. I'm horribly busy and there is nothing I want to think about less than Nick Mallory."

"I haven't, no." My grandfather sat down a few steps below me. "The only message I've brought is that Dora made gingerbread yesterday and she's sent you some. No, I'm here because I need to know more about your journey between Romanov's house and Blest."

Apparently I'd been wrong. There was definitely something I wanted to think about less than I wanted to think about Nick. 

"I've written it down," I said. "Everything I could think of. It's there."

"I wouldn't ask you about it again if I didn't have to," said Grandad. "This is important, Roddy. Did you have any sense of the passage of time after you left Romanov's house and before you landed in my garden? Think. Please."

Please. From my bluff, gruff Magid grandfather who knew everything.

I thought hard. Finally I shook my head. "No. I'm sorry, Grandad. It's...Things happened, but I can't remember how long they took to happen. And some of them seemed to happen at the same time as other things were going on."

He made an odd, sharp, not-quite-laughing noise that I didn't like. "You're not the only one."

I stared at him. "Please tell me you're joking."

He ran a hand over his face. "We're not really sure. That's me and your other grandfather, by the way. I've been to see him a few times in Wales, and he's been here once. And Romanov's been back and forth meeting with both of us. Comparing notes has gotten us nowhere.

"We think that the changes in the magic of Blest have affected some of the ways that time...happens. Has happened. Are you going to drink that?"

Without waiting for an answer, he plucked a pebble from his pocket and dropped it into the center of the glass mug. It made a tiny splash, and the tea rippled towards the edges of the mug in neat circles.

"The pebble is the date, six weeks ago, that everything changed," said Grandad. "The flat surface of the tea is time, the time that used to be--past, and present, and things happening at the same time in different places."

We watched as the ripples spread to the edges of the mug, becoming less neat as they got further from the place where the pebble had dropped. Some of them hit the edge of the mug and began rippling back in again. Some of them flattened against the edge of the mug. In a few places, tiny bubbles formed, floating on the surface.

"We're not sure yet what's going to happen next," he said. "Or whether we might stumble across something that's suddenly always been different. Blast it, there aren't even any useful words to talk about it yet."

Without thinking, I asked, "Can it change the past so that something never happened?" Then, "Oh."

"Yes, oh," Grandad echoed. "If the past had changed so that Grundo never glamoured you, you might not remember it ever having happened. Or, you might remember all of it. We have no way to know."

I shut the Baring-Gould thoughtfully. "I've traveled in time once already." 

My grandfather looked at the book, and then at me. "Not on purpose, you didn't," he said. "And not under your own power. I think this is the moment where I tell you not to experiment with those flower spells of yours." 

I opened my eyes very wide. "Oh, no. That would be dangerous. I'd never do that."

Grandad sighed. "Well, I can tell your parents I warned you, anyways. I'm a poor example when it comes to poking a hornet's nest with a stick."

He fished around in his pockets and handed me a grease-spotted paper packet. "Dora's gingerbread. I wouldn't eat it if I were you; she ran out of treacle, and I don't like to imagine what she might have used instead. Any chance your Mrs. Candace will ask me to stay for dinner?"

 

2\. 

In those first few months, I often felt as though I were several different people. There was the Roddy who I had been for most of my life. Then there was the Roddy I had quite suddenly become on the day I found out that the first Roddy had been some sort of horrible false thing, that one of the things that had shaped her had been a magical compulsion. 

That second Roddy terrified me when I remembered her afterwards--her anger, her despair, the sickening memory of realizing she could never allow herself to trust anyone again--but remembering having been the first Roddy was worse. Even now, I still dream sometimes of looking into the mirror and seeing, not my own face at my current age, but my childhood face, only with a frozen fixed smile and empty eye sockets like a half-finished porcelain doll.

I was relieved, in the month I'd spent in my grandfather's house, to find that I was growing into a new, third Roddy--to find that it was possible to feel something other than rage and fear. I was still angry when I thought of what Grundo had done, but it became possible to go for an hour without thinking of it, and then for several hours, and then for a whole day, and then to speak to him. 

I missed my almost-brother horribly. Grundo was, had been, my oldest friend, and now the person who'd been my oldest friend was gone, just as the Roddy who'd been his friend was gone. I had said that to Nick, sometime during that month at Grandad's.

"Well, you wouldn't be the same people forever even if everything had gone on the way it was going," Nick had pointed out. "You'd get older, and so would he, and things would change no matter what. Although..." He'd gone a bit pale, then, and had gone rather quickly out into the garden to stare at the dahlias for a while.

It had been all too easy for me to complete his thought. If Grundo hadn't taken his spell off me, we might not have changed. Our bodies would have grown up, and I would have spent all my life looking after a grown man as though he were a child. I would have done it and I would have been happy, because I wouldn't have known I was being glamoured to do it.

After that, I was almost glad to talk with Grundo again, to walk into a room and find him still shorter than me and with that odd voice that was still a child's voice for all its knotted gruffness. 

Relief doesn't drown anger, but it wears away a few of the sharp edges. The Roddy I had been all my life had been like tightly wound wire strung with prickles--trying to poke through the glamour somehow, I think, even though I didn't know it was there--and the second Roddy had been like a handful of broken glass. 

The Roddy I was growing into was the first person I'd ever been who was soft enough to be hurt by touching something sharp. There were days when none of the edges were worn away in the slightest, when I could feel the anger cutting me until it bled, and still I carried it against my heart.

3\. 

In the end, I really did leave the time-traveling spells alone. There were too many other things I needed to learn.

A great deal of being the Lady of Governance had to do, not with doing magic myself, but with understanding how other people did it. This would have been more difficult if I hadn't been raised in the King's Progress, where people who used magic constantly lived side-by-side with people who didn't have it.

One of the first things I learned was that most people, other than hereditary witches, thought the Merlin was the only person who looked after the magic of Blest. I had thought that, myself, for all my life, until I was in a car with my aunt Judith and my twin cousins, and Judith told me where we were going.

Mrs. Candace, and the women who'd held her post before her, had never tried to hide what they were or what they did. They told people, quite frequently, that the Merlin's power was balanced by another wizard of similar power. It was just that no one really took them seriously.

That sounded familiar, somehow, that experience of trying to explain something and feeling like you were trying to walk through deep water just to get your point across. I turned it around in my mind until it fit into a space that was exactly the right shape--a space that hadn't been there until just before six weeks ago. Some of my memories were never coming back, but this one couldn't have been pried loose with a crowbar.

When I recognized it, I swallowed, very hard, several times, and ran to find Mrs. Candace. 

I caught up with her in the stillroom. Mrs. Candace was a weather-wizard when she was young, like my dad is now, and to this day her stillroom always has exactly the right light and heat to make the best of whatever she's working on. Today the room was dim and dry and spangled all over with tiny starbursts of sharp-scented blue where dried lavender flowers had fallen off their stems. 

She looked up from her workbench, saw my face, and put down her scissors. "What is it, dear?"

I took a deep breath. Lavender is calming, and I hoped it would help. "People don't believe. That you. That you watch over magic. That you do what the Merlin does. You tell them, but they don't believe."

"Yes." Mrs. Candace was watching my face. 

"It's a spell, isn't it?" Another deep breath. "Like the one Sybil used. So that no one would believe Grundo and me when we tried to tell people what she was doing. Everyone brushed us off because we were children and we couldn't really understand what was important. This is like that."

"Yes," said Mrs. Candace again. She sounded...not sad, or not only sad, but tired. "It is a very, very old magic. Older than Sybil and her workings, if that makes you feel any better about it." Resigned, as though she knew it wouldn't. 

"Another glamour." I felt my throat swell and my eyes sting. So much for lavender. "I'm going to spend the rest of my life being brushed aside, and patted on the head, because of another damned glamour."

"Not necessarily." Now Mrs. Candace sounded neither sad nor tired. Her voice was like iron. I looked up into her face and saw how she would have looked fifty years ago, when her hair was dark and her back was straight and her hands held the reins of the summer storms. 

"This magic is very old, Roddy, but there are things that are older. To everything there is a season. And to every season there is an end."

**a light from the shadows shall spring**

1.

I came home late for tea one day. It had long since been made clear to me that I was always, always expected to know what time it was. I think that that level of awareness would have been expected of me as the future Lady of Governance, even if something hadn't picked up Blest and shaken it like a cupful of Liar's Dice, but the time disturbances had made most people very alert about such things.

There were voices in the sitting room when I tiptoed past. The woman’s voice that answered Mrs. Candace was Manchester, all broad vowels and husky laugh. The third voice sounded like a young man, slower than Romanov's voice and not so deep as Nick's. I took a few minutes to wash my face before I went in.

"You're late, love." Manchester nudged the chair next to her and handed me a cup of tea when I sat down. "How've you been?"

"Sorry. It was a swarm of bees today, and I'm not very good at understanding them yet." I smiled at her. I like Manchester. She's old, old, _old_ , but she looks like she's not yet thirty, and she wears short dresses and big heavy boots and does mad things with her hair. Her voice sounds like Mam's velvet Court gown feels, only deeper and snagging on things once in a while. I'd do anything to have a voice like that.

Mrs. Candace began inviting Manchester to tea now and again after I came to live with her. I think she thought that living alone with an old person might not be good for me, and that I should spend some time with someone who at least looked young. 

The third voice certainly qualified. Sitting in the oldest of the chairs, the one that went wobbly if you leaned the wrong way, was a boy perhaps two years older than me. Curly rust-red hair, blue eyes, worn corduroy trousers, fisherman’s knitted jumper, farmer’s boots. 

I blinked once and moved back up to the hair. There were leaves caught in it. 

"Roddy, dear," said Mrs. Candace, every bit the slightly dotty elderly grandmum, "this is Glastonbury."

Well, all right, if Manchester could look younger than my parents, it stood to reason that some of the others could look young if they liked. Only. Well. This was an interesting new development.

"Hello, then," said Glastonbury, grinning broadly. 

"Hello," I said, and dropped into the chair beside Manchester. "You sounded older, when I was in the hall just now."

"Easy trick. Hardly worth mentioning," said Glastonbury. "Shall I teach you how to do it?"

"Yes, please," I said, "but could you help me work on the bees first?"

That was how I met the spirit of the place that was once called Avalon.

Glastonbury came to tea at least once a week after that, sometimes more. It was by way of being a favor to my grandfather. Not Grandad Hyde, but my other grandfather. There was some connection between them, Gwyn ap Nudd and Avalon, that I wasn't meant to know about, but it meant that Glastonbury owed a debt and was willing enough to pay it in singing lessons.

"Some of those flowers of yours," said Glastonbury, "they work better if you sing, don't they? Or at least differently. Don't you want to know what they do?" He jumped his eyebrows at me. He'd already found that I blushed when he did that, no matter what he was saying when he did it.

That was Glastonbury: cheeky grins, a hint of something that would always be just a little older than me in a very specific sort of way, and the endless question-- _don't you want to know?_

(I did. I always had. The Izzies had often called me Miss Know-It-All; I would have liked to see them now and tell them that there was much more to know than I had imagined, and that I still wanted all of it.)

The singing lessons were wonderful, although I was disappointed that my voice never grew furry and crackly like Manchester's. Under Glastonbury’s supervision (and sometimes with his help) I slowly worked my way through the flower spells, exploring them in detail and mentally marking some of the files DO NOT TOUCH. Being able to sing made many of the spells easier, or at least less exhausting to use.

The glamour that made people forget about the Lady of Governance didn't affect Glastonbury, which served as a constant and handy reminder that he wasn't human. He had spent a very long time among humans, though, and had a remarkable understanding of how people got along with each other. It was years before I realized he was giving me lessons in that, too.

Time passed (observed carefully by many, many people, even after it became generally understood that whatever had caused the time disturbances wasn't causing them any more). Glastonbury appeared to age as I did, so that he always seemed to be just a year or two ahead of me. 

By the time I was eighteen, he knew all my secrets except one. Or so I thought.

 

2\. 

Romanov had been as good as his word where the Izzies were concerned. During the month that I'd stayed with Grandad, the two of them, Romanov and Grandad, had spent a certain amount of time shouting at each other about it. Now that I think of it, that may have been when Toby and Grundo began spending most of every day out of the house. Quarrelling makes Toby go all pulled into himself like a snail.

The end result of the shouting had been that Romanov had gone to Sutton Dimber and fetched the twins back with him to Grandad's house. And, after two excruciatingly long days, Grandad and Romanov had taken the twins somewhere else. I didn't much care at first exactly where they'd gone, as long as Grandad thought it was safe and they were far away from me.

"Being with other children is what they need," Grandad had told me, when I'd finally asked him. "Will and his missus have six daughters of their own. That might--just--equip them to cope with our twins."

I'd had no news for an ominously long time, but eventually there was a letter from one twin and then the other. Grandad's friend Will turned out to be another Magid--I found out afterwards that he was in fact the older brother of the Magid who'd married Nick's sister--and his family lived on a farm on a world called Thule. 

Nearly everyone on Thule had magic, even young children, and the twins were (as Grandad had suspected) nothing special there. The Izzies' letters were one string of complaints after another at the beginning: all the magic felt different, Will's family were boring, the six daughters were dreadful, and the twins wanted to come home. 

A year went by, and then another and then three more. By then, the letters were sounding happier, and not so much like they'd been written by bad playwrights. The letters signed 'llsa' were full of plans for returning to Blest and giving Grandad no peace until he agreed to apprentice her to a Magid. The letters signed 'Is' were full of admiration for farm life and references to something called Venetia which at first I thought was a place on Thule. 

Venetia, it turned out, was the eldest of the six daughters, somewhere in age between the Izzies and me. It became clear afterwards that there was a connection between her frequent appearances in Is's letters and Ilsa’s determination to leave Thule. People grow apart, it happens, but no one ever said it was easy.

3.

During that first year with Mrs. Candace, I went to visit Grandad's house a few times. Dora had spent some time with a Magid healer, after the Dragon, and was considerably easier to talk to nowadays: she had allowed her hair to go back to its normal colour and didn't wear so many charms. 

We would spend a Saturday afternoon weeding the garden, or drinking tea at the kitchen table, and catching up on the news from the neighbors and from Mam's and Dad's occasional visits. It seemed kinder not to talk to Dora about magic, since she'd been turned out by her own mother for not having enough of it, so we found other things to talk about. It was nice.

And then Toby and Grundo would come home from wherever they'd been, and suddenly the garden and the house would be filled with enormous awkward spaces that defied all attempts to fill them with conversation. The plan of Grundo going to live with his father had been abandoned; he had stated flatly that he wouldn't go unless Toby could come with him, and in the end he'd gotten his way and stayed at Grandad's instead.

The boys didn't understand, any better than anyone else did, what I was doing or who Mrs. Candace was. Their minds simply bounced off it, or swerved around it. I would try yet again to explain, and I would see their eyes meet with an articulate glance that equated my flower spells and Governance work with dolls and little girls' tea parties--just as though the three of us and Nick had never done important things, done them together. 

There was no together any more, there was only Toby and Grundo, and me on the other side of the empty space with no bridge across to reach them.

(People grow apart. It happens.)

After the fourth visit, I hugged Grandad goodbye and told him that I wouldn't be coming to visit again for a while. 

Grandad understood, sometimes, a bit. The glamour that concealed the power of Governance mostly worked on him the way it did on everyone else, but now and again his Magid spellworkings were such a different kind of magic that they cleared his mind for a little while. He kissed the top of my head and said that the boys and I would understand each other better when we were older. 

He came to see me at Mrs. Candace's house instead, and Dora and I grew used to visiting over the far-speaker. Getting connections on the far-speaker was one of the few things I was really good at that Mrs. Candace wasn’t.

Besides Dora, Mam or Dad rang at least once a week. It was odd at first, not seeing either them for months or a year at a time when I'd spent the first thirteen years of my life seeing both of them every day, but it was far odder when the Progress made its way through Salisbury and my parents came to visit me. Like everyone else, they couldn't really fix their minds on what I actually did all day.

 

4.

While I was living with Mrs. Candace, Nick was going to school on Earth, and studying magic with Romanov on the island in his school holidays.

I only found out about that later. From the time I said goodbye at Grandad's house, I didn't see Nick Mallory again for five years.

**renewed shall be blade that is broken**

1.

Just before I was eighteen, Romanov and Toby and Grundo came to Salisbury to see me.

I hadn't seen Romanov since the month after the Dragon. He looked just the same; he has one of those faces that five years can't really change one way or another. However, I had never seen him look quite this angry.

It had been, at that point, three years since I'd last seen Grundo and Toby. Grundo was sixteen now, and Toby a bit younger, but Toby looked older than me. He'd grown tall and stocky, like his father, and his hair was much darker than I remembered. 

Grundo wasn't tall, but he'd got very thin, and he moved as though he had a coat hanger inside the shoulders of his shirt. His fair hair, a few shades darker than his mother's and sister's, curled profusely and needed cutting. Slimmed down, his sharp features were recognizably Romanov's. He stared determinedly at his shoes and looked as though he were trying to disappear.

"I'll leave you three alone," said Romanov between his teeth. "Ambrose has something to tell you."

He stalked inside--they had found me in the garden--and slammed the door. I looked over at Grundo. "Ambrose?"

"He started it last year," said Toby. "It's his real name, after all, and he shares it with so many previous Merlins. Roddy, please, let him..." He trailed off.

I stared from one of them to the other. "What's going on? Spit it out, whatever it is."

"It's Nick," said Ambrose. His voice had gone very deep since I'd last seen him, and he still spoke as though he was pulling each word out of the back of his throat.

"What's happened to Nick?" I was proud of how even my voice sounded. "Tell me."

"Nothing's happened to him," said Toby quickly. "At least we don't think so. We haven't spoken to him."

"Neither have I." I was beginning to get an uneasy flutter somewhere in my ribcage. 

"No. We know you haven't." Ambrose clasped his hands behind his back. I think it was because they were trembling.

"Ambrose," I said. " _Grundo_. What have you done?"

He took a deep breath and said quickly, "Five years ago, I told Nick you never wanted to see him again because he glamoured you."

Lavender, I thought firmly, and forced myself to take a deep breath. Then another. And another.

When I was sure I could breathe without it getting stuck on the way out, I said, "He didn't glamour me. He didn't even try." 

Toby started to say something, and I held up a hand to cut him off. "Do you know how I know?" I continued. "Because Nick's mother tried to control him with magic for all his life, until she died. He had to learn to fight it off when he was very, very small."

Ambrose made a choking noise.

"To cast a glamour on another person would be the unforgivable thing, for Nick." I met Ambrose's eyes. "And you took it on yourself to tell him that I thought he'd done it. To me. To _me_."

"Roddy," said Toby sharply, and grabbed my wrists very gently. He turned my hands palms-up. That was when I realized how tightly I'd clenched my fists. My nails had carved little bloody crescents into my hands.

I had the ridiculous impulse to apologize, and squashed it ruthlessly. Toby murmured something and stroked his thumbs in a circle over my knuckles, and the cuts faded away. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d learned new magic these last five years.

"You were so different." Ambrose's voice was barely a thread. "After--after the Dragon. You'd never said a kind word to him before that. He hovered about and bothered you. I know he did. And then suddenly you were talking to him, and telling him things." He paused. "You smiled at him. What was I supposed to think?"

"You weren't supposed to think anything!" I put every bit of Glastonbury's singing lessons behind it, and my voice fairly boomed. "It was nothing to do with you! You had no right!"

"No," said Toby quietly. "We hadn't. But we thought we were protecting you." He let go of my hands.

I glared at him. "You had no right to do that, either."

"We meant well."

"Good intentions mean nothing." I couldn't stand to look at either of them. I spun around and started pacing on the grass. "Why are you telling me now?"

"Romanov," said Ambrose. "He asked Nick once why he never talked about you--Nick, I mean--and Nick said you were angry over something he'd done."

"That was a couple of years ago," Toby added. "But a few days ago something brought it to his mind, and he asked Nick again."

"And this time Nick told him." I thought of that--how much Nick admired Romanov, and how it must have hurt him to tell Romanov what I supposedly thought he'd done.

"Romanov didn't believe a word of it," Toby went on. "He swept in on us like a thunderstorm, and marched us straight here to face you."

Ambrose was staring at his shoes again, and his angular shoulders were hunched over so far he looked like he was trying to hide in his own shirt collar. "I expect you can't forgive me this time. Not after I did it again."

I blinked at him. "Did what?"

He looked at me, and his eyes were too shiny. "Betrayed you. A second time."

The Roddy I had been--either of the Roddys I had been--would have ripped him to shreds and sent him packing. 

The Roddy I had become stepped forward and put my arms around him. 

"I don't think like that any more," I said. "Things are bigger than that, now, for me."

Ambrose laughed shakily. "I think they must be."

Toby's arms came around both of us. "We don't understand it," he said into the top of my head, "but we understand that there's something we don't understand. It's a start."

"Grandad told me we'd understand each other better when we were older. I don't think this is what he meant." I unwound myself from the triple hug. "I'll go and put the tea on. The three of us have a lot to catch up on." 

They didn't follow me. I glanced out the kitchen window and saw them standing there in the garden, wrapped tightly against each other. Ambrose's head was buried in Toby's shoulder, and Toby's head was bent over his in an angle that could only be called protective. It was not a brotherly embrace.

I wasn't shocked, only a little startled. They'd been so young, years ago when they first refused to be separated. Now, though, both of them were older than I had been when I met Nick--and I'd long since given up trying to convince myself that I hadn't felt anything for Nick.

The view of Toby and Ambrose through the window got rather blurred for a little bit then. I would never have what they had. After what Nick thought I'd accused him of, I was quite certain he would never want to see me again. 

After a little while, I washed my face and tapped on the window to call the boys in for tea.

2.

Becoming the Lady of Governance was a thing of gradual accumulation. Each year, a little more awareness shifted from Mrs. Candace to me. The year I was fifteen had been one long upward slope of learning first to hear the sounds that plants made when they grew, and then learning not to hear them so I could occasionally get some sleep.

My eighteenth birthday marked the first time Mrs. Candace left me alone in her house overnight. Quite a lot of her power--mostly the parts that let her monitor how other people were using their magic--was tied to the house itself, or the land that it stood on. She doesn’t often leave it.

When the Dragon had been summoned, and Mrs. Candace had come to Stonehenge, she had still been sharing her house with a number of invisible beings who assisted her. She had been able to leave the monitor-magic in their hands (or paws or claws) for a short time. They had all vanished by the time she came back. It was just as well that I was at Grandad's house for a month, because she had needed most of that month to restore things to normal.

"What if I miss something?" I stared at the dining room table. Laid out on it in neat rows were several dozen seemingly random objects: an empty jar, a dried pansy, three white stones set so that they touched only at their corners, and other things. 

Each of the objects represented something Mrs. Candace is keeping an eye on. She herself no longer needed the physical reminders, of course. For me, however, we’d spent the better part of a week collecting each object, sorting out where on the table it should go in relation to the other things, and determining what change in its physical state would indicate which change in whatever it represented. 

(The empty jar was a hereditary witch in Laverstock whose first baby was due any day. I glanced at the jar and willed it to stay empty. The flower spells for midwifery are filed under mugwort, which always makes me nervous because if you don't use mugwort exactly right it's poisonous instead.)

Mrs. Candace smiled. "I'm only going as far as Dimber House, dear, and I'll be back the day after tomorrow. It's not as though you need to sit here and watch them. As long as you look in on them once every couple of hours, they'll be perfectly safe." 

She reached over and pressed a tiny piece of clear quartz to the back of my left wrist. It stuck there. "The objects are keyed to that. It'll glow green if anything changes." We heard a car rattle up outside. "Your aunt Judith is here. So kind of her to fetch me. Will you come and see her?"

"I think," I said slowly, "I'd better not go out of the house just now."

She raised her eyebrows. "Does it feel rather as though you've suddenly opened a dozen eyes you didn't realize you had?"

"Yes."

Mrs. Candace smiled again. "It always feels like that at first. You'll grow used to it soon enough. Be careful with sharp edges and staircases until it wears off." She kissed my forehead and was gone.

I heard the sound of the car doors opening and closing, and the soft vanishing rumble of Judith driving away. Once it faded away, everything as very, very quiet.

After a moment, I shook myself a bit and moved carefully into the kitchen. Even before I learned to cook, I always felt more comfortable in that kitchen than in any other room in Mrs. Candace's house. It was big and sunny and had any number of interesting corners and built-in cupboards. 

Shortly after I'd moved into the house, I'd come down to breakfast one day and found a large, squashy armchair wedged into one of the interesting corners, with a proper reading lamp next to it and a tiny table. Mrs. Candace had waved an elegant hand in the chair's direction and mentioned that she thought I might like to have somewhere comfortable to study. 

Even after spending my entire life in the tents and buses of the King's Progress instead of in a proper house, I knew that most people didn't have armchairs and study tables in their kitchens. Mrs. Candace is not most people.

Now, alone in her house, I gently evicted two of the cats from the chair and sit down. I was seeing...hearing...I didn’t have words for the extra sensations that had swarmed in on me when the quartz had touched my skin. 

One of the cats hopped into my lap and knocked her head against my fingers to demand petting. I focused on the touch of the fur under my fingers and the sound of her vibrating purr. At some point, the odd new not-quite-feelings began slowly to recede. And at some point after that, I fell asleep.

A flash of light woke me. I glanced quickly at my wrist, but the crystal remained clear. Then, what--Thunder crashed outside, followed by a roar of falling rain and the cat's swift departure.

"Right," I said to myself firmly, and climbed out of the chair. I flipped the switch on the reading lamp, and that was how I discovered that the electricity was out. Well, all right. The day had been cloudy and emphatically still, and I didn’t need to be a weather-wizard's daughter or the Lady of Governance to know that a thunderstorm was on the way. Just noise and light and water. Nothing to be afraid of, even if I _was_ completely alone for the first time in...possibly ever, really.

The rain was taking on the hissing, swishing sound that meant it was changing rapidly to snow. I hurried into the dining room to look over the objects. None of them had changed. From there, I went through the rest of the house, shutting windows and avoiding looking into mirrors. I wasn’t sure I could look at myself with my new eyes yet.

When that was finished, I lit candles and lamps against the rapidly growing darkness, and went back into the kitchen to think about supper. Before I came to any useful conclusions, something banged fiercely on the door that led inside from the garden.

The nice thing about being alone in a house is that there is no one to hear you yelp when you are startled by a sudden loud noise. Or to see how silly you look when you pick up a very sharp bread knife and sneak up on the door as though it were a sleeping lion.

I opened the door and was faced with a tall, broad-shouldered, _extremely wet_ person.

"I didn't," said the wet person. "I swear on my magic, I didn't do it."

I stared for a moment. Then I put down the knife, said "Come in before you drown," and led Nick Mallory into my kitchen. 

3.

He shut the door behind him, stood just inside it, and dripped. "No, wait _here_ ," I said, steering him onto the little patch of carpet in front of the sink, and went into the bathroom to fetch a towel. When I came back, Nick hadn’t moved.

"I never used magic on you," he said hoarsely. "But it might have been a near thing. Not after I found out what Grundo did. But. Before. If I could have put a glamour on you, if I knew how, Roddy, I might have done it, I might have made you, forced you to like me, forced you to want me--"

"You wouldn't have needed to," I said, and kissed him.

He made a startled noise, then drew me close and kissed me back. It went on for a while. Water ran off him and pattered softly onto the carpet and the forgotten towel. Somewhere in there, it vaguely occurred to me that kissing a snow-covered someone only meant that two people got cold and wet. I ignored it.

There had been a moment, Nick and the second Roddy, pressed together like this, standing outside Romanov's house. The first Roddy had had no idea how to cope with the humid insistence of what Nick felt for her. The second Roddy had pushed him away because she had taken refuge in a fear-flavored anger that was cold and dry and withered whatever it touched--no warmth or softness, ever again, thank you very much.

The third Roddy had spent five years remembering that moment. When I'd been cold, I'd imagined Nick standing against my back, his arms around me, and felt warmer. When I'd been sick or hurt, I'd imagined the pain as a tangible thing and concentrated on Nick's cheerful selfishness as a physical shield between it and me. 

The magic, and the power of the Lady of Governance, had often made me feel like a tiny and rapidly dissolving speck on the surface of something too big to compass. The entire world of Blest, and the span of centuries--I could vanish, swallowed up in it, and nothing would change. Most people wouldn't even know what it was that had swallowed me. I'd leave no mark. 

When that feeling overwhelmed me, I had fixed my thoughts on Nick. He was purely self-centered, eternally rooted in himself and wrapping his surroundings around him because he believed what he wanted was important. I was one of the things he wanted--had wanted, anyways. He would never, ever forget me, even if he never saw me again. I believed in that when I couldn't believe in my own ability to anchor myself.

Someday he would figure that out, how important he was to me, and his conceited smugness would inflate beyond all reason. For the moment I ignored that too, and let myself be lost in the joy of having a second chance.

"Opportunist," I murmured against his lips after a time.

He shook against me, a suppressed chuckle somewhere deep in his chest. "You're one to talk. Who've you been practicing with?" Just as if he had any right to ask.

"I haven't, actually," I answered him, just as if he had the right to know. "However, I have received some _very_ thorough advice. Remind me to introduce you to Manchester."

Nick chuckled again and let me go. "Where did we put the--oh." He picks up the towel and rubbed it over his head. "Sorry about the weather. I didn't know it would do that."

I had been moving towards the stove to make tea. Now I stopped, and turned very carefully to look at him. "I'm sorry, did you just claim responsibility for a snowstorm?"

"A little bit," came a sheepish voice from under the towel. "It started a few months ago. At first I thought it was a coincidence."

"Of course you did. Hang on a second." I shut my eyes, opened them again, and _looked_ at him--not as a girl looks at a boy, but as the someday Lady of Governance looks at a magic-user.

My new eyes showed me, quite clearly, the lines and fields and currents wrapped around him. "Well, that's new," I said.

"So's that," said Nick, looking at me admiringly. I remembered that look very well. When I was thirteen, it had alarmed me, had made me think he was seeing something in me that wasn't really there, or something that was there without my knowledge. The first Roddy had had no idea what to do with Nick.

Now, five years and two Roddys later, I understood that his admiration was for all of it at once, my face and my body and my talents and my magic. No one else had ever looked at me like that, has ever appreciated all those things at the same time--

"Wait," I said. "You can see it? What I'm doing now?"

"Why wouldn't I?" He sounded puzzled. "It's like you just picked up something alive, a snake or a salamander or something, and put it around your neck. I mean, of course someone without magic probably wouldn't see it, but..."

"Oh." I blinked. "You're not from Blest. It doesn't affect you."

"What doesn't affect me?"

"Long story," I told him, "and you'll catch your death. Upstairs, second door on the right, green guest room. Toby and Ambrose--Grundo--stayed here last week and left some clothes behind. Toby's things ought to fit you."

He froze. "You're still speaking to them. Even after you found out what they did." Not a question.

"I did say it's a long story." Somehow I couldn’t quite look him in the eye. "Go and put on something dry. I'll make supper and we'll get caught up."

Nick stayed upstairs for a good long time, and I heard the shower running. I checked the objects in the dining room, and set out sandwiches and tea and hot soup at the kitchen table. When Nick came downstairs, wearing Toby's jeans and blue jumper and his own leather jacket (now wiped dry) I waved him into the chair opposite me.

"All right," said Nick, partway through the soup. "I'm sorry for twitting you about Toby and...I'm sorry, I _can’t_ think of him as Ambrose. It's your business. But--look, please don't make me go through this if you already know it--Grundo did tell you why I haven't written or anything, these last five years, didn't he?"

I nodded. "He told me a few weeks ago. And I told him that he was wrong. I didn't even stop to think about it."

Nick shut his eyes. "You shouldn't have. What I said before--I would have done it if I knew how."

"I don't think you would," I said thoughtfully. "If you had, you'd never have known whether I was with you because you glamoured me or because I truly thought you were worth it. In the end, your ego couldn't have stood it." 

He ducked his head, but I could see he was smiling a little. Nick had always had an odd relationship with his own self-interest; he understood perfectly well that he was selfish, and I thought he was a little proud of the fact that he continued to get away with being it.

"That isn't to say," I added, "that I didn't get angry when they told me about it. But if I've learned anything, it's that I can't just banish people from my life when they do something terrible. It..." I stopped. "The work I'm doing is built on connections among people and things. Cutting off a connection feels like it diminishes me, somehow."

"Well, especially that connection." Nick nodded. "Toby's your cousin, after all, and Grundo's his..." He trailed off.

"You know about them?"

He nodded and swallowed a bite of sandwich. "Romanov mentioned it. Years ago. I think he knew before they did. Apparently a number of past Merlins have had male consorts. Roddy, I know I don't understand Blest magic, but shouldn't a Merlin be required to have a female consort to keep things balanced?"

"Funny you should mention that," I said.

Nick had known, that month we lived at Grandad's house after the Dragon, that I was going to be something called the Lady of Governance. However, he hadn't really understood what that meant--goodness knew _I_ hadn't really understood it, so it's not as though I could have explained it to him. Telling him about what Governance means--how it balances the Merlin's power, and why no one really knows about it--took us through the rest of dinner, through the washing-up, and into a second pot of tea at the kitchen table.

"All right, then," I said, "what about the thunderstorm?"

Nick became very interested in stirring sugar into his teacup. "It only happens when I'm visiting Romanov," he admitted. "Which is a relief, because if storms followed me around on Earth it would be very difficult to explain."

"Ye-ess," I said, making _keep going_ motions with my hands.

"Like I said, I thought it was coincidence, and so did Romanov at first. That island of his, you know it's a bit of a patchwork? He thought maybe he was getting weather from the different places that made up the bits of his island."

I frowned. "Weather doesn't work like that. His island should have its own weather."

"I think it usually does." Nick sipped his tea, looked thoughtful, and added a bit more sugar. "Anyways, he figured it out before I did. I turned up a few weeks ago for a lesson and he told me I'd tangled myself up with weather magic somehow. Wanted to know why you or Maxwell Hyde hadn't hauled me off to your dad to get me straightened out."

"Oh," I said. "And you told him how long it'd been since we'd spoken."

"Too right I did." Nick looked embarrassed. "We had a proper row about it. Spent a lot of time yelling because we were both misunderstanding each other for a while. Finally he asked what I'd done to make you throw me over--it's not as though he'd ever think I'd done the throwing." He paused. "It was really, really hard to tell him."

I put a hand over his where it lay on the table. "What happened?"

"He puffed himself up to yell again, and then he didn't. It was a bit funny, really. He so obviously wanted to tell me that I'd been an idiot for believing Grundo. But he couldn't, because if it had been true--if you really had believed I'd glamoured you--then he couldn't blame you for never speaking to me again.

"In the end, he sort of spluttered, and told me not to go anywhere until he came back, and he took off."

I grinned. "That'd be when he swooped in on Toby and Ambrose. They said he came after them like a thunderstorm."

"I imagine so." Nick smiled too. "He told me he'd banged their heads together and dragged them off to straighten it out with you, and then he’d gone back to explain it to your grandad." His smile vanished. "I haven't spoken to him yet, your grandad, I mean. Not very sure that he wants to see me."

"Well, if you'd actually glamoured me, he wouldn't," I said. "Not unless it was to tell you that he'd found a really permanent way to make sure you could never do it to anyone ever again."

"I thought of that, actually." Nick looked down at our clasped hands. "The Magids probably do have some way to strip a person of magical power, for things just like this."

"Is that why you didn't write or anything? When you knew that I'd found out what happened? Because you didn't want to face my grandfather?" I pulled away my hand and stood up.

" _No_ ," said Nick quickly. "Roddy, no. I'm an idiot, but not that much of one. Please?"

"Your idiocy knows no limits," I told him, but I sat back down.

"It really doesn't." Nick moved his hands toward mine, and then pulled them back. "I didn't write, or ask Romanov for his phone--far-speaker--or anything. I should have. It's only that I wasn't sure how to begin." He looked so embarrassed that I felt a little sorry for him.

"What happened, then?" I asked, almost teasing. "Struck by lightning?"

"Struck by commerce." Nick poured more tea into both our cups. "Romanov had business in the Market and took me along." I nodded. The Market in Salisbury city, currently held on every other Wednesday plus major festivals, dates back to the thirteenth century. Some of the objects Mrs. Candace had laid out on the dining room table had been bought there.

"I was wandering among the herbal wizards' booths while I waited for Romanov to finish his errand," Nick continued. "I turned a corner and there was a little stall selling soaps and lotions and things. The bloke selling them didn't look like a wizard. When he asked if I was looking for anything, I thought he was setting up a hard sale on me, so I said I wasn't sure. 

"It was odd, really. He looked sort of pleased when I said that. And he said that if I didn't know what I was looking for, then what I needed was this."

Nick dug something out of a pocket inside his jacket and handed it to me. It was a tiny flat jar, smaller than the palm of my hand, clear glass with something green inside it. 

I looked at the label. _For clarity of vision_ , it said in neat handwriting. And, in small letters at the bottom, _Pook's Hill, Sussex_.

"The man who sold you this," I said slowly, handing the jar back to him. "You said he didn't look like a wizard. What _did_ he look like?"

"A university student picking up extra cash on a holiday job.” Nick held the jar up to the light and squinted at it. "He had jeans on, and boots, and leaves caught in his hair."

So this was what my life had become. First I stumble into a magical inheritance which makes me perfectly suited for a job no one can believe in. Then I wind up with an adopted older brother who's actually a city (or the Isle of Avalon, for goodness' sake). And, if that's not enough, said older brother turns out to be one of the few magical beings who sees nothing wrong with using his ancient and wise powers to _read my mind_ , to the point of _scanning my memory_ , just because he's miffed that there's something I'm not telling him. 

Not for the first time, I thought that the woman who gave me those flower spells had a lot to answer for.

“Roddy?” Nick was looking at my hands. No, at my wrists. “Roddy, is it the light through this jar that’s doing that?”

The quartz crystal stuck to my wrist was glowing green.

I ran into the dining room, my eyes already scanning across the things on the table. Laverstock witch. First baby. Jar. Jar was still empty? Jar was…not there.

“It’s a boy,” said a woman’s soft voice. “Not what most hereditary witches want for their first, but she’s got plenty of time to have daughters. It happened so quickly that they didn’t need to call you. They’re both sleeping just now.”

In the corner by the china closet, full of shadows, the Lady who is the Spirit of the Land of Blest was sitting with the Laverstock witch’s jar in her hands. The jar was three-quarters full of water.

Without even thinking about it, I dropped to one knee and bowed my head before her.

The Lady smiled and shook her head. “No need for that, particularly not in your own house when I’ve come unannounced. It’s good to see you again, Arianrhod.”

“And you, my Lady.” I struggled to my feet. “It’s been a long time.”

Her face clouded. “Longer than you know.”

“The Magids think that…” I wasn’t sure how to put this. “That you were—distressed by the changes five years ago. And that the flow of time in Blest was disturbed as a result.”

“The Magids are clever,” said the Lady ruefully, “but in this instance I’m afraid they’ve got the wrong end of the stick.” I must have looked surprised at that, because she added, “You don’t actually need to tell them I’ve said either of those things. They’d believe you, and they’d be insufferable afterwards.”

“Forgive me, my Lady, but if they’re wrong, then…”

The Lady sighed. “The changes to the magic have not disturbed time. It would be more accurate to say that my attempts to influence time may have affected the nature of the changes.” She actually looked ashamed. “It didn’t go entirely as I predicted, and some of the consequences of my error have fallen on you.”

“What consequences?” I hadn’t seen Nick follow me from the kitchen, but now he was standing behind my left shoulder just as if he belonged there, and he was _questioning_ the Lady and he wasn’t even one of her own people--

\--and then he was wincing because he had one of my elbows digging none too gently into his ribs. “Shut _up_ , Nick.”

“It is a fair question, Arianrhod.” The Lady looked…pleasantly surprised? “I’m not surprised by your choice of champion, but you,” and now she was looking over my shoulder at Nick, “are not as you were when last we met.”

“No, m—my Lady,” agreed Nick. “It’s been five years for me.”

“So it has been for everyone,” the Lady told him dryly. “Time returned to its normal direction and measure the day after the events at Stonehenge. Upon the day of those events, however…” She paused. “Arianrhod, what do you remember of our first meeting?”

A lot of the things that had happened that day were really terrible. I slid my mind quickly past the memory of Nick being taken as a sacrifice, and let it land gently on the moment when I first saw my Lady, herself, the land come to life.

“I remember you sorting through history. Rearranging some bits.” She had looked rather like the women sorting through the jumble sale tables in Salisbury Market, but I didn’t mention that.

“Yes.” The Lady looked grave. “I thought I could make use of the general upheaval to right a very, very old wrong. It wasn’t entirely successful. Do you remember anything else?”

“Many things,” I said, with a slight shiver, “but that’s the only thing I remember about you.”

“What you don’t remember,” said the Lady softly, “is this.” She held up the Laverstock witch’s jar, which, now that the witch’s baby was born safely, was only a glass jar with water in it. Except that it wasn’t, because there was something in the depths of the water.

“Scryglass,” murmured Nick into my ear. I had a quick moment to feel grateful that the Lady had chosen to _show_ me whatever she wants me to know, instead of simply placing the knowledge in my head the way Glastonbury did once.

And then the darkness and echo of a scryglass spell were all around me and all I could do was listen and watch.

* * * * *

_Roddy Hyde is thirteen years old and covered in mud._

_The gray shapes of Stonehenge reach towards the sky. Around her, people are shouting, screaming, waving their arms, dropping to their knees to help the injured._

_There is a boy, a most maddening and incorrigible boy. He is lying on the ground, looking not at all like himself. Roddy’s grandfather is leaning over him, and another wizard, and they are using magic to make him well._

_Somewhere, while she wasn't watching, she gave him her heart. If he isn’t restored to himself, his own maddening stubborn self, Roddy thinks she may die of it._

_She has retreated to stand against one of the great stone pillars. She will stay out of the way until she is sure she is not going to do something ridiculous like scream and scream and never stop._

_That is where the Lady finds her._

_She doesn’t speak, at first, only puts her back against the pillar next to Roddy and waits._

_After a time, she says, “This is not how I would have had us speak to one another for the first time, Arianrhod Hyde.”_

_Young Roddy—at the very beginning of her third self, although she doesn’t know it yet—looks sideways and up to meet the Lady’s eyes. “Are we going to speak to one another more times than this?”_

_“That depends on you,” says the Lady. “Do you understand what has happened to you?”_

_Roddy blinks. “No? Yes. I’m sorry. A lot of things have happened.”_

_The Lady smiles at her. “It’s I who should be sorry. You have had to endure a great deal over the last few days. I’m speaking particularly of your new magic.”_

_“Oh. Well, yes.” Roddy pauses, and says, “At least I understand how I received it. Sort of. There was a spell in place that was waiting for a person who met certain conditions, is that right? And when the person came along, the spell would bring them backwards through time to where they could be given the magic, and then the spell would bring them back to their own time.”_

_“Correct, if simplified.” The Lady’s face is grave. “You met the woman who gave you her magic. I won’t ask if you understand what it cost her. We must now, however, speak of what it will cost you.”_

_Roddy has grown up at Court. She understands too well that no gift is ever without price. “Service? Or—“ In spite of what she promised herself, she glances over at the boy lying on the ground. “—or sacrifice?”_

_The Lady looks at her with what Roddy is astonished to recognize as respect. “You are very quick, Arianrhod. No, you will not have to give him up. You may choose to do so, later, but the choice will always be yours. You are owed that much.”_

_Roddy wonders fleetingly if the Lady means that the way it sounds—if she means that Nick will never turn away from her of his own accord. Will he never be granted the same freedom of choice Roddy herself has somehow earned?_

_Or has he already chosen? Can someone possibly know, at such a young age, what they truly want?_

_“Service, then,” she says, and bows her head before her Lady. If Roddy is fortunate enough to receive two gifts—magic and her maddening, impossible boy—then the price will be beyond her imagining, but she will pay it._

_“All your life,” the Lady tells her. “Power, Arianrhod, power to equal the Merlin. Responsibility to equal the Merlin.”_

_“There’s more.” Roddy has, after all, been brought up at Court. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”_

_“There is more.” The Lady pauses. “If you accept this service, you may serve all your life in secret. The work you will do may be hidden, even from those who love you best. Think carefully about whether you want to carry such a burden as that.”_

_Roddy looks at her. “You make it sound as though I have a choice.”_

_“You always have a choice,” says the Lady, her Lady, weary and gentle. “The magic that was given to you can be returned to its giver. You would be free of any obligation.”_

_And sometimes what a person wants becomes instantly clear to them, however young they are. “No. My life in service to you, my Lady, to use the gift that’s come to me.”_

_She cannot be imagining the relief in the Lady’s eyes. It means something, that relief, that weariness._

_“Am I,” Roddy says slowly, “the first person to whom this magic has been given?”_

_“No.” Everything around them seems, suddenly, very still as the Lady speaks. “It was given once to another._

_“She was the young bride of the Merlin, centuries ago. When they were wed, she had some magic of her own. Small gifts—easing a childbirth, aiding the growth of a beloved garden, the sort of thing that was thought of as a woman’s proper magic in her time. And then one day she went alone for a walk, and traveled further than she knew. She returned home with the same gift you now bear._

_“Her Merlin husband could not accept a wife whose power so nearly mirrored his. The spell he cast was meant only to strip away her magic. He did not know it would claim her life in the process.”_

_Roddy has never seen anything like the grief on the Lady’s face. She knows—everyone who is born with magic is taught—that when a spell kills, even by accident, the magic of the person who dies can wield itself against the caster. The long-ago Merlin who tried to remove his wife’s power would not have survived the experience._

_“The magic returned through time to its original owner,” the Lady continues quietly. “She had to wait, for centuries, until another suitable person was born. And so we come to you.” She sighs. "Even by the standards of human life, you are very young. By the reckoning of such as I, you have not yet lived even so long as the blink of an eye."_

_“Roddy! Where are you?” She hadn’t noticed the silence before, only the Lady’s voice in the stillness. Her father's voice, calling to her across the field, startles her._

_The Lady puts a hand on Roddy’s shoulder and leans down to meet her eyes. “Go on, Arianrhod. I will come to you again and offer you this choice once more.”_

_A few steps away, Roddy turns back. “Will I remember any of this?”_

_“No.”_

* * * * *

Scryglass spells have always disoriented me, and the new not-quite-eyes through which I was now seeing everything were not helping. I woke up on the floor of Mrs. Candace’s dining room half-lying in Nick’s lap and surrounded by the smells of shower soap and damp leather.

“Let me get up. I can’t breathe.” I shoved at his shoulder until he stood up, lifting me as if I weighed nothing, and set me on my feet. He took up his post at my left shoulder again: close enough for another elbow in his ribs if necessary. Close enough to touch, always and ever, until I chose otherwise.

"I told you I would return, Arianrhod." The Lady set the jar of water on the floor and stood before me with empty hands. "It is time for you to decide again.

"If you wish it, I can take the ancient magic from you. You would retain the power with which you were born--which, I should point out, is considerable--but you would be free of your service to me. You would be free," her eyes flickered over my shoulder to where Nick stood, "to choose another path. With any companions you desire.

"What will you choose?" She held out a hand to me. 

I ignored it. "I need to know something first. I think I've got the right to ask."

Everything seemed, suddenly, to go very still, as if all the world was holding its breath. This had happened once before. I had seen it in the scryglass, just before...just before I had asked a question.

I looked the Lady steadily in the eye and said, "Why was I the only one, in all these years, found suitable to receive the ancient magic?"

"Because you are the only one, since the first one, who is bound to a Merlin."

And there it was. I was almost relieved to have it out in the open. I would never be free of it, the thing Grundo had done when we were children, the thing that had shaped my life.

Never free, no. Never free. But in service by my own choice, and using this bond to my own purposes instead of letting it use me.

If I had been able to remember my first meeting with the Lady, to remember that this choice would come, I honestly have no idea how I would have chosen. I didn't know what to choose now. There were too many things to consider. The magic--Mum and Dad--Nick--Mrs. Candace. Me. 

Me. I had been spellbound, when I was too young to know it, to believe that what I wanted wasn't important. The spell had been taken off five years ago, and I had gone right on doing what I thought was best for other people, trying to prove that I wasn't selfish. Had I wanted to be selfish?

What did I want to do? What did _I want_?

Well, when I put it like that, it was easy.

I shut my eyes for a moment, opened them, and looked at my Lady without my new not-quite-vision. Only myself. Only Roddy.

"The magic was gifted to me. I will keep it, and pay the price."

And every single object on the dining room table came alive with glorious, glowing green light.

I found myself staggering backwards slightly, and Nick caught me without looking. We were both staring at the Lady. I had seen her smile sadly, seen her smile kindly or bitterly or wearily. But I had never seen her look _happy_ before now. Her smile lit her face from somewhere deep inside her. 

"Oh, Arianrhod," she said, and her voice was like singing. "I have hoped you would be the one."

I was dazzled by the light and by her smile. My brain felt very slow and thick and I couldn't bring myself to care. "What one have I been?"

"The spell, idiot," murmured Nick against my hair. "The one that conceals the Lady of Governance. Weren't you listening?"

"Your champion is correct." The Lady nodded at Nick. "When the first Lady of Governance was killed by her Merlin husband's spell, her own magic created a shield to stop it from happening again. The spell prevented anyone from realizing that there was always a woman whose power equaled that of the Merlin. 

"It could be broken only when the burden of Governance was taken up by a woman who was bound to a Merlin and could wield power to equal his. Ambrose bound you when he did not know he would become the Merlin, and you accepted the gift of power before you knew its price. No spell can now conceal the Lady of Governance, or her power. Not ever again."

Her eyes met Nick's. "Champion, and now Master of Storms. For you, I think, the choice has been different."

Nick's arms tightened around me. "Five years ago I chose Roddy, for as long as she'll have me. All the rest is just working out the details." 

The Lady's eyes twinkled. She held out her hand. Lying in it was the small, flat jar of green stuff Nick had bought from Glastonbury in the Market. "Don't lose this. You never know when some extra clarity will come in handy." 

She leaned forward and tucked the jar into the pocket of Nick's jacket. Then she kissed me on the forehead. "Brightest and best, child, your eyes are the size of saucers. Put her to bed, champion."

Nick blushed. My Lady giggled--actually _giggled_ like a young girl. She was still laughing when Nick steered me up the stairs.

* * * * *

Much later, Nick raised his head off the pillow and said, "Manchester?!"

"Tell you in the morning," I said, and blew out the candle.

\--end--

**Author's Note:**

> Copious thankyous to beta readers silverr and gala_apples. (Betas, please do let me know if you'd rather be credited under a different name!)


End file.
